Five Legendary Lost Photography Archives, and What Became of Each One

Some of the most important photographic archives ever assembled are gone, and a small number of historians have spent their careers trying to get them back. One of those hunts had a storybook ending. In December 2007, three weathered cardboard boxes reached New York's International Center of Photography, carrying roughly 4,500 Spanish Civil War negatives that had been missing since 1939.

The other archives on this list did not come home. They burned in a Yosemite darkroom, went bankrupt and scattered, were smashed to pieces on the Antarctic ice by the men who made them, and were buried in occupied Poland only to disappear in a war four years later. A negative is not a manuscript you can reset from an earlier draft. It is a single physical object, and when it is gone, every print that could have come from it is gone with it. That is what makes these stories sting.

The five did not end the same way, and the differences matter. Two are gone past any hope of recovery, one burned and one deliberately smashed by the men who made it. One is a mixed case, with a great deal safe in federal collections while nobody can say how much was destroyed along the way. One vanished when a kibbutz was overrun in 1948 and has never been accounted for. And one came home after sixty-eight years.

The Mexican Suitcase: The One That Came Home

When Robert Capa left Paris for New York in 1939, ahead of the German advance, he entrusted his negatives to his darkroom assistant, Imre "Csiki" Weisz. Weisz packed them into small boxes and got them out of the city. By a route that has never been fully reconstructed, they passed into the hands of General Francisco Aguilar González, Mexico's ambassador to the Vichy government, who carried them home to Mexico City, where they sat forgotten for decades.

What Weisz had saved was extraordinary: 126 rolls of film, about 4,500 negatives, shot between 1936 and 1939 by Capa, Gerda Taro, and David Seymour, the photographer known as Chim. The three of them, working out of Paris and shooting in Spain, largely invented the visual language of modern war photography. Taro was killed covering the war in 1937. Capa himself died in 1954, killed by a landmine while photographing the war in Indochina. His brother Cornell Capa, who founded the International Center of Photography in 1974, spent years chasing rumors that the negatives had survived.

The trail finally led to Benjamin Tarver, a relative of the general living in Mexico City, who had inherited the boxes. He surfaced in 1995, telling the curator Jerald Green at a Spanish Civil War exhibition in Mexico City that he had pictures he believed were Capa's. Green passed word to ICP, ICP wrote to Tarver, and the letters went unanswered. Cornell Capa kept trying over the years and got nowhere; Tarver stayed elusive and uninterested, and nothing moved for more than a decade. In 2007 ICP's chief curator brought in Trisha Ziff, an independent curator based in Mexico City, who reached Tarver that spring and finally saw the boxes in his home. When the boxes reached ICP in December 2007, Cornell was 89. He died the following year. Even this happy ending kept one mystery alive: the negatives did not include the frame behind The Falling Soldier, the 1936 image whose authenticity historians have argued over for decades. The most famous single negative Capa ever exposed is still missing.

Ansel Adams and the Yosemite Darkroom Fire

In 1937, a fire broke out in Ansel Adams's darkroom at Best's Studio in Yosemite Valley. Adams fought it with help from Edward Weston and Weston's future wife, the writer Charis Wilson, but by the time it was out the damage was done. The fire destroyed about a fifth of his negatives, by the Ansel Adams Gallery's count, and by other estimates as much as a third of his early work. It also damaged the glass negative for Monolith, the Face of Half Dome, the 1927 frame in which Adams had first darkened a sky with a red filter and announced the style that would define him.

The loss cut deepest in a period that was already thin. Adams made relatively few negatives in the 1920s and early 1930s, so the fire did not just shrink the archive, it erased a chunk of the record of how one of the most influential American photographers found his voice. A negative is a master. Lose it and you lose not one picture but every print that might ever have been made from it, which is exactly the instinct that drives any serious landscape photographer to build and then guard a life's body of work.

Mathew Brady's Civil War Negatives

Mathew Brady bankrupted himself photographing the Civil War. He financed a fleet of operators, among them Alexander Gardner and Timothy O'Sullivan, and produced thousands of glass-plate negatives of soldiers, camps, and the dead. When the war ended, the public wanted to forget, the pictures stopped selling, and Brady lost everything. His negatives were split, mortgaged, and left to gather dust.

When Brady declared bankruptcy, many of his negatives went to public auction, and in 1874 Secretary of War William Belknap bought part of the collection for $2,500, according to the National Archives. The following year the government bought 3,735 more plates directly from Brady, under a $25,000 congressional appropriation, according to the Library of Congress. Every dollar went to Brady's creditors. Even then the collection was scattered and neglected for decades. The Library of Congress bought its own set in 1943, and the National Archives now holds more than 6,000 of the negatives, so a great deal did survive. The trouble is that no one can say how much did not.

One story, repeated for generations and almost impossible to document, has crates of unsold glass negatives sold off to gardeners, who scrubbed the silver images from the plates and set the clean glass into greenhouse roofs, where sunlight slowly burned away the last of the war. Historians treat the greenhouse tale as folklore more than fact. What is not in doubt is the neglect it stands in for. An unknown number of Brady plates were broken, dumped, or wiped for their glass, and that portion of the visual record of the Civil War is simply gone.

Frank Hurley's 400 Smashed Plates

When Ernest Shackleton's ship Endurance was crushed and sinking in the Weddell Sea in 1915, the expedition photographer Frank Hurley dove into the flooded wreck to save his glass plates, which were sealed inside soldered tins. He came back up with well over 500 of them. Then came the hard part.

Shackleton ruled that the men, now stranded on the ice with a long haul ahead, could carry almost nothing. So Hurley and Shackleton sat down together and went through the plates one by one. They kept about 120 and smashed the other 400 or so on the ice, a decision Hurley recorded in his diary on November 9, 1915, made because there would be no room for them in the boats and because a broken plate could not tempt him back for it later. He also kept a small Kodak Vest Pocket camera and a few rolls of film for the rest of the ordeal.

The 120 survivors, including the famous shot of the doomed ship lit by flares set on the ice around it in the polar night, became some of the most reproduced exploration photographs ever made and helped turn the failed expedition into a legend of endurance. Roughly 400 images of one of history's great survival stories were destroyed on purpose, by the two men best placed to know what they were worth, because keeping them would have meant carrying weight that might have cost lives. The State Library of New South Wales holds Hurley's Paget colour plates from the voyage, the only known colour photographs of the expedition, while the original glass plate and celluloid negatives are held by the Royal Geographical Society in London.

Mendel Grossman's Buried Negatives

Mendel Grossman photographed the Lodz Ghetto from the inside, at the risk of his life. Assigned to the ghetto's statistics department, which gave him access to a camera and film, he hid the camera under his coat and shot through a gap in the fabric, documenting the starvation, the labor, and the round-ups that emptied the ghetto over the war years. He built one of the only visual records of the Lodz Ghetto made by someone imprisoned in it, image by dangerous image.

In August 1944, before the final liquidation, Grossman hid roughly 10,000 negatives. He was deported soon after and died on a death march near Konigs Wusterhausen on April 30, 1945, reportedly still holding his camera when he collapsed. He was 31.

After the war his sister and her husband recovered the hidden negatives and brought them to Israel, where they were stored at Kibbutz Nitzanim. In 1948, during the Arab-Israeli War, the kibbutz was overrun and the cache of about 10,000 negatives was lost. The images that had survived the Nazis did not survive the peace. What survives came through two separate routes: prints Grossman had handed to friends and acquaintances while he was still alive, and photographs his friend Nachman Zonabend hid inside the ghetto. Those are now held at institutions including Yad Vashem, the Ghetto Fighters' House, the Museum of Jewish Heritage, and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and they are all that keeps any of what he risked his life to record in front of us.

Lead image by Frank Hurley, 1915, public domain. Source.